THE NAMING OF CATS, AS MR. ELIOT SAID, IS A DIFFICULT matter. How did paganism get its name? Here I have to speak about one of the slipperiest and most misleading words I know.
If you wanted a biblical word for “people not like us,” for “the other,” you could draw on, for example, Matthew 6:7, ethnikoi, “people of the [other] nations,” which imitated Hebrew usage. It equates roughly to “gentile”—which is to say, people of another nation, another tribe, who live somewhere else and have other customs from ours. When all religion was local, that was a plausible way to talk about people unlike yourself.
But the successful Christians of late antiquity chose to go beyond the Bible for the word they needed, and so we get the entirely nonbiblical “pagan” from Latin paganus, alive to this day in, among others, English and the Romance languages. It’s a critical, and dangerous, part of how we think about ancient religion.
“Paganus” to a classical Roman was something like “peasant,” and indeed the English word peasant descends to us from the same root as does pagan. A pagus was a country district, a paganus someone who lived there; so Cicero tosses off a phrase about pagani et montani, “peasants and mountain-folk.”1
Two things happened to get this word to where we see it now. First, a sharp-tongued Christian used it to make a point.2 In early Christian metaphor, the true Christian was a “soldier of Christ,” miles Christi, which made good sense especially among those communities that were insisting that Christians could not serve as real soldiers in earthly armies. At about this time (call it 200 CE), with a Roman army distributed from Scotland to Jordan to Algeria to Moldova, occupying forts and camps in country districts to protect the borders of empire against the illegal immigrants they called barbarians, the word paganus had become in ordinary usage something like the everyday word for “civilian.” If you weren’t a government-paid, well-dressed, well-fed soldier in those parts, you were a “civilian,” a paganus—and the word wasn’t any more kindly meant than its equivalent on modern military bases. You just weren’t serious, weren’t strong, weren’t a fighter; you were just ordinary, tedious, gutless, and poor.
In the Christian usage, you were then either a soldier of Christ or a civilian, a miles Christi or a paganus. Most of the people expected to hear this language were either Christians or heading toward becoming Christians. The goal was to flatter both groups that they were the few, the proud, the brave, the martyrs-in-waiting. The pagani—they got a sniff and the back of a hand and nobody thought any more about them. It’s the story of an ordinary speaker’s and preacher’s trick, using familiar vocabulary and images to make a point.
Time passed. By well into the 300s, Christians were everywhere. Christianity was fashionable, it had state backing, new church buildings were going up, and bishops were now men of substance with permission to use the imperial system of fast relay horses to get from town to town. After a very long period in which Christianity in the Latin-speaking world hadn’t produced theologians or developed a culture of dialogue and debate, now there were many Christian writers. Some were Roman dignitaries and scholars who got religion, such as Ambrose or Jerome, while some were provincial intellectuals, such as Augustine. The newly invigorated and confident literature of sermons, treatises, and poems that they produced constitutes one of the golden ages of Latin literature. We have more surviving Latin literature from this century between 350 and 450 than for any comparable period before that, including the more famously golden age of Caesar, Cicero, and Vergil.
Some of these Christian writers imitated the larger and more sophisticated Christian literature already available in Greek and read what they could find of earlier Latin Christian writing. We can’t pin down its origin, but in a few writers beginning around 370 we see the word paganus crop up again.3 It was handy, now especially, for Christian writers full of themselves and the success of their tribe, to have a word for them, the old school folk. Here was a good word ready to hand.
There was only one problem. The slightly precious point of the way the word was used, where paganus was the un-miles, got lost. The Christian writers of the fourth century just knew it was a word that older Latin Christian writers had used to label their enemies and took it up to use themselves. When they had to explain its origin and meaning, they did what they often did when faced with an etymological question: they made stuff up. Sometimes they’d get things right by accident, but they had little way of knowing that. One of my favorite of these explanations is the root they find for the word lucus, a thick stand of trees in a forest where a god might lurk, where spooky darkness reigned in Tolkienesque woods. Etymology? “Lucus a non lucendo”: roughly, “we say lucus because there’s no light there.” A silly thing to say, but it sufficed.4
By that measure, the fourth-century Christian etymology of paganus is quite sensible. Country districts, the argument went, were the places where Christianity made slowest progress, and those still stuck in the old ways were pagani. The part about country districts wasn’t true, but it had the great advantage of mocking the traditionalist values of city people who prided themselves on their urbanity. For an arriviste Christian polemicist to point to some perfumed gentlemen and call him a paganus, a countryman, was just witty.5 When Christians wrote in an earnest attempt to convert these people, they stayed away from the word for fear of giving offense.
So pause there. This word isn’t an analytical term from philosophy or even sociology. It’s a stereotype, a club to hit people with. The speaker has drawn a line of his own choosing between them and us. What “they” think of it is not as important as what the word does for building a common consciousness for the in-group. (The lesson of the Pharisee in Luke 18 hadn’t entirely sunk in.) Team-building, we call it nowadays, and the unlearned lesson is the one from Robert Frost’s poem about wanting to know what he was walling in or walling out and to whom he was likely to give offense.
Use a word often enough, and you begin to think it describes reality. You begin to think people you’ve labeled and lumped together are an actual tribe deliberately organized to thwart your own. Not only have you made pagans seem like a real group, you have, in distinguishing yourself, become an un-pagan, with special qualities.
Until that label was created, though, pagans didn’t exist. There were people who lived here and there, people who spoke this or that language, people who were rich or poor, people who attended this or that festival because they enjoyed it, and people who were so tired and poor and ill that they just got through the day as best they could. It was the Christian who came along and called all those people by one name. Christian common identity was strengthened by the shared conviction that the us/them relationship was real. “They” didn’t much care.
Centuries at least would pass still before anybody firmly outside the Christian community ever used the word to describe himself. Even more time would pass before anybody would not only use the word but accept it and take a little pride in it. Yes, eventually, the word would begin to have a functional meaning independent of its original polemical usage. When one community dominates the conversation long enough, even people who do not belong to it begin to accept its categories and shape their behavior according to them. In Israel and in Utah, I’ve understood myself to be a gentile, but I had to work at it.
Notice now the most important part of this discussion. The usefulness of the words pagan and paganism grows genuinely strong after the nominal “triumph of Christianity” in the time of Theodosius. Julius Caesar wasn’t a pagan. He wouldn’t have understood what you could possibly mean by getting out of your time machine and calling him one. No one else would have understood either.6 People became pagans when it was convenient to Christians for them to do so. Calling the others by that name made it clear just how special, unique, and different Christianity claimed to be.
There’s one oddity to all this that’s worth bearing in mind. The Greek language, still the language of the most prosperous and populous regions of the Roman Empire, essentially the language for every city east of Belgrade and Benghazi all the way to the Euphrates, did not take up the term paganus or one like it. In those parts, the settled term even among Christians for traditionalists in matters of religion—and not just of religion—was Hellenes, a word that did mean something. Hellen was the mythical progenitor of a tribe whose name eventually expanded to be the everyday Greek word for “Greek,” and at least by the test of language it was easy to tell to whom the term pointed. The natural opposite of “Hellene” is not a religious term but a linguistic/ethnic one: “barbarian.” This opposition points to a very different kind of us/them polarization, one with its own pathologies.7
The story of the word pagan has important implications. We use “pagan” and “paganism” habitually and unthinkingly and they leave at least the idea that once upon a time there really were such people locked in a mighty struggle with the Christians. There aren’t good alternatives, and for good reasons. I know scholars who insist on saying “polytheist” instead—but that has the same problem as “pagan,” because nobody ever thought of himself as a polytheist until some other person began to make a large fuss about monotheism. I incline to say “traditionalist” and use that word from time to time, I hope when it’s clear what I mean.
When Christianity came to war with skepticism and unbelief in the eighteenth century, the pagan-Christian story became a kind of proxy war for modern attitudes. An intense debate over Gibbon’s infamous fifteenth chapter of The Decline and Fall on the rise of Christianity had little to do with history and everything to do with Gibbon performing and devout readers attacking his own passage from Anglicanism to Catholicism to skepticism. From approximately that time forward, the war between pagans and Christians offered believers a place to demonstrate the exaltation of Christianity and offered unbelievers a chronicle of its hypocrisy and corruption.8
In the end, the creation and propagation of the term pagan succeeded in making Christianity seem a unique un-pagan, modern entity. Just how true was that claim? Excepting Judaism, was Christianity essentially different from all the other religions of Mediterranean antiquity?